3 - Attitude -- how it affects your learning

You love jazz. You want to play it to enjoy it further. You will be eager to know things. That way you'll learn faster. If you have people who is interested to see you progress, you'd like to show your progress to them. Consequently you'll learn thigns faster.

At first, I simply wished to play on time. That is to go along with rhythm without any stress at all. Which requires hard training on figners. It took me an hour to go to my teacher. I have devised a few tricks that can be done while I am on the train.

One was to spread fingers. You make fist and spread it as powerful as possible. In doing so, you try to extend your little finger.

You'll see that repeating it several times build your fore muscle a bit. You can accumulate your forearm muscle this way, as a matter of fact. Don't over do it. Several times at once. Do this training in the morning, afternoon and before you go to bed.

If you do this practice too much, your muscle become stiff. Stiffness doesn't fit to play piano. Your muscle has to be flexible. Otherwise your finger doesn't move fast.

Since you are not child, you can measure how fast your finger can move, right? As the simple yardstick, you can use your watch, but with a second hand. One beat a seond is rather slow. If you can strike your desk top using little finger four times while a second hand count up to next second, you got enough speed.

So start hitting your desk top 2 times a second with your little finger, you'll feel that you have enough finger speed to play tunes with tempo specified as medium fast.

The truth of the matter is that you invent some way as you get more motivated in learning things. And if your attitude gets to that level, it's not that far to reach your objective.

Jazz with young people

I have started to learn piano at the age of 17. Do you remember how this age was? You guessed right! I wanted to be popular.
Being the late starter, I have developed many shortcuts so that they recognize me a good piano player.
One thing is that I selected jazz piano as my target. Of course I liked jazz very much. But this is not to write my first encounter with jazz. Continue. . .



When I traveled up north to Newport Jazz festival in 1967, I had great jazz experience. One hundred pieces full band played "Begin the Beguin". The reason why I remember it is that a boy of 13 years old took solo part. His clarinet was just fabulous!

I was 23 at that time and had passed 5 years since I started piano. I was awed.
But then, do I stop playing my piano? Not at all. I started to build my style since then.

How I start play jazz piano

Here's intermittance. Let me tell you how I started. I know there are many people who wish to play piano deep in their heart. If you are a man, you surpress that feeling by saying to yourself "I am a man. There's no time to tease around things that does not earn me money". Being a woman may be a bit different like saying "I am too busy with kids and keep home organized".

Well the truth is that both is wrong. Music isn't any excuse. If you feel like it, you enjoy it. One day you enjoy classical music and the other day you'll enjoy listening to Beatles.

I put up an article titled at an article site, "http://ezinearticles.com" under Arts-and-Entertaiment/music. It should be on the site within a few days. Check it out to entertain yourself.

2 - The key to productive practice -- Spaced repetition

I cannot guess "productive practice" means. Learn to play piano is not manufacture something. But I have one idea relating to the word of "productive".

If you practice too much, you may ruin a couple of day because of the pain at your elbow. In training your fingers, you'd better realize that your little finger and ring finger are there to hold things. Their function were not defined to strike something.

Thereby if you work on those two fingers, your elbow starts to overwork and may accumulate some heat. It's like the shoulder of baseball pitcher. If you pitch too much, your shoulder gets sore.

Then you need to plan your practice. 15 minutes in the morning and evening would be best. It totals to 30 minutes, but you never try to practice 30 minutes consecutively. It easily hurt your elbow, and thereby it can't be productive in a long run.